A Performance Survey of Lightweight Virtualization Techniques

The increasing prevalence of the microservice paradigm creates a new demand for low-overhead virtualization techniques. Complementing containerization, unikernels are emerging as alternative approaches. With both techniques undergoing rapid improvements, the current landscape of lightweight virtualization approaches presents a confusing scenery, complicating the task of choosing a suited technology for an intended purpose. This work provides a comprehensive performance comparison covering containers, unikernels, whole-system virtualization, native hardware, and combinations thereof. Representing common workloads in microservice-based applications, we assess application performance using HTTP servers and a key-value store. With the microservice deployment paradigm in mind, we evaluate further characteristics such as startup time, image size, network latency, and memory footprint.